non- Confor MisM & transgr Ession

By EnriCo MEdda

Pasolini's artistic parabola was constantly accompanied by an aura of scandal and transgression. In the Italy of the 1950s and 1960s, torn between the moralism of Christian Democrat power and rigid Communist orthodoxy, his willingness to explicitly address the most scabrous aspects of human existence appeared intolerable to many people, with a long series of lawsuit filed against him and even physical assaults by neo-fascist groups. The hostility towards the artist was exacerated by his choice to live openly his tormented homosexuality, which had already caused him legal trouble and expulsion from the Communist Party when he was still living in Friuli.

One of the most ‘scandalous’ aspects of his literary and filmic production was his explicit way of dealing with sexual themes. Dealing with the theme of male prostitution of Roman suburbs’ boys in “Ragazzi di vita” (1955) was the cause of a trial for pornography, which ended with an acquittal, thanks to the authoritative interventions of intellectuals such as Pietro Bianchi, Carlo Bo and Giuseppe Ungaretti, who highlighted the poetic values and the charge of human compassion that characterised Pasolini’s work. Years later, it was the films “Teorema” (1968) and “I racconti di Canterbury” (1973) that were seized for obscenity, and many charges were pressed against “Il Decamerone” (1971) and “Il fiore delle mille e una notte” (1974). But once the deforming lens of moralism was removed, it became clear that Pasolini's approach as an artist to sexual themes is anything but morbid and often full of poetry. Especially in the trilogy “Trilogia della Vita” (“Il Decamerone”, “I racconti di Canterbury”, ““Il fiore delle mille e una notte”), once any sense of sin is eliminated, sex is presented in a joyous and vital way, within a fairy-tale setting. Films that touched on religious topics, such as “Il Vangelo secondo Matteo” and “La ricotta”, were also the focus of strong controversy, with accusations of vilifying religion. In that case, however, it was less difficult to recognize the profound respect with which Pasolini had approached the figure of Christ, while emphasising its revolutionary aspect. His reinterpretation of the Gospel also obtained consensus from the ecclesiastical world and Catholic critics, while the judgments from leftwings critics were less enthusiastic, with accusations of contamination between Catholicism and communism.

But it is on the political side that the strongest non-conformist nature of Pasolini’s work becomes evident: his refusal to conform himself to the ideology of bourgeois society and his compromises with the past regime, his disgust for the new reality of rampant consumerism, and his ability to detect the crisis of Marxism, and the betrayal of the hopes for renewal, born with the Resistance.

All this progressively led Pasolini to pessimistic positions, culminating in the allegorical reinterpretation of the work of Marquis De Sade in “Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma”, an unsettling depiction of the unspeakable atrocities that those in power arbitrarily carry out against the weaker, just for their own pleasure. A true challenge to censorship, which shows with icy objectivity all sort of repulsive behaviour, and which triggered the last judicial storm against the author, who had tragically died only three weeks before the movie's release. An equally bitter analysis, by the way, was present in the play “Pilades” (1967). After Orestes avenged the murder of his father and regained power in Argos, the mythical pair of friends Pylades and Orestes split up at the time that Pylades unsuccessfully pursues the ideal of communist revolution, while the other establishes a democracy inspired by American technocratic and progressive reason. However, Orestes soon reverts to the old practice of utilitarian politics, which protects class interests, and allies for convenience with the obscurantist and reactionary forces represented by his sister Electra.

Syarafuddin Little Angel With Cellphone

This aspect of Pasolini’s production opens up a vast field for photographic exploration. The authors in this section focus primarily on the representation of the corporeal dimension (“Le streghe” and “Roberta e il Lupo” by Piero Colle, p. 36) and on the uninhibited manifestation of diversity and all forms of uncoded love, such as the embrace of “Amor ogni cosa vince” (Antonio Lorenzini, p. 14), and the untitled image by Julie Fowells (p. 23). Ambiguity and liberation are also connected with the Dionysian experience, to which Pasolini was very sensitive: this direction is explored by images such as Chiara Pulin's “C'è Dioniso in ognuno di noi” (pp. 30-31) and Igor Dražić’s “Gran Bolero” (p. 34), where the vitality of the nude dancers recalls the famous theatrical performance “Dionysus 69” by Richard Schechner. Rose Battistella's “Narciso fuori di me” (p. 26-27) and the magical face of a beautiful young woman portrayed by Zurab Babaev (p. 38.) lead us to a more dreamlike dimension.

On the side of political non-conformism, the symbolic image by Babis Kavvadias (p. 32) deserves a mention: the silhouette of a female figure represents the forces of popular protest in the demonstrations that took place in Athens in 2018.

La parabola artistica di Pasolini è stata costantemente accompagnata da un’aura di scandalo e trasgressione. Nell’Italia degli anni Cinquanta e Sessanta, divisa fra il moralismo del potere democristiano e la rigida ortodossia comunista, la sua volontà di affrontare in modo esplicito gli aspetti più scabrosi dell’esistenza umana apparvero a molti intollerabili, al punto da costargli una lunga serie di cause in tribunale e persino aggressioni fisiche da parte di gruppi neofascisti. L’ostilità nei confronti dell’artista era acuita dalla sua scelta di vivere apertamente la propria tormentata omosessualità, che già quando viveva ancora in Friuli gli aveva causato guai giudiziari e l’espulsione dal Partito Comunista.

Uno degli aspetti più ‘scandalosi’ della sua produzione letteraria e filmica era il suo modo esplicito di affrontare le tematiche sessuali. L’aver toccato in “Ragazzi di vita” (1955) il tema della prostituzione maschile dei ragazzi delle borgate romane fu causa di un processo per pornografia, che si concluse con l’assoluzione grazie agli autorevoli interventi di intellettuali come Pietro Bianchi, Carlo Bo e Giuseppe Ungaretti, che misero in luce i valori poetici e la carica di umana pietà che caratterizzava l’opera. Anni dopo toccò ai film “Teorema” (1968) e “I racconti di Canterbury” (1973) subire il sequestro per oscenità, e le denunce fioccarono anche per “Il Decamerone” (1971) e “Il fiore delle mille e una notte” (1974). Ma una volta rimossa la lente deformante del moralismo, apparve chiaro che l’approccio di Pasolini come artista alle tematiche sessuali è tutt’altro che morboso e spesso pieno di poesia. Nella “Trilogia della vita” in particolare (“Il Decamerone”, “I Racconti di Canterbury”, “Il fiore delle Mille e una Notte”) il sesso, rimosso ogni senso di peccato, è presentato in modo gioioso e solare, all’interno di una cornice di favola.

Anche i film che toccavano temi religiosi, come “Il Vangelo secondo Matteo” e “La ricotta”, furono al centro di forti polemiche, con l’accusa di vilipendio alla religione. In quel caso tuttavia fu meno difficile arrivare al riconoscimento del profondo rispetto con il quale Pasolini si era accostato alla figura di Cristo, pur sottolineandone l’aspetto rivoluzionario. La sua rilettura del Vangelo ottenne consensi anche dal mondo ecclesiastico e da critici di matrice cattolica, mentre da sinistra i giudizi furono meno entusiastici, con accuse di contaminazione fra cattolicesimo e comunismo.

Ma è sul versante politico che si coglie la più forte carica anticonformista dell’opera pasoliniana: nel suo rifiuto di lasciarsi omologare all’ideologia della società borghese e ai suoi compromessi con il passato regime, nel disgusto per la nuova realtà del consumismo dilagante, e nella capacità di mettere a fuoco la crisi del marxismo e delle speranze di rinnovamento concepite con la Resistenza.

Tutto questo portò progressivamente Pasolini su posizioni pessimiste che giungono al culmine nella rivisitazione allegorica dell’opera del marchese De Sade in “Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma”, impietosa rappresentazione delle indicibili atrocità che chi è potente arbitrariamente compie, solo per il proprio piacere, nei confronti di chi è più debole. Una vera sfida alla censura, che mostra con gelida oggettività ogni sorta di comportamenti ributtanti, e che scatenò l’ultima tempesta giudiziaria contro l’autore, morto tragicamente solo tre settimane prima dell’uscita del film. Un’analisi altrettanto amara, per altro, era presente nel dramma “Pilade” (1967), nel quale la coppia mitica di amici Pilade e Oreste, dopo che quest’ultimo ha vendicato l’uccisione del padre e ha ripreso il potere in Argo, si dividono nel momento in cui il primo persegue senza successo l’ideale della rivoluzione comunista, mentre l’altro instaura una democrazia ispirata alla ragione tecnocratica e progressista di matrice americana, ma presto torna al vecchio modello di politica utilitaristica, che protegge interessi di classe, e per convenienza si allea con le forze oscurantiste e reazionarie rappresentate dalla sorella Elettra.

Questo aspetto dell’opera di Pasolini apre un vasto campo d’indagine per una esplorazione fotografica. Gli autori di questa sezione si rivolgono innanzitutto verso la rappresentazione del corpo (“Le streghe” e “Roberta e il Lupo” di Piero Colle, p. 36) e la disinibita manifestazione della diversità e di ogni forma di amore non codificato, come l’abbraccio di “Amor ogni cosa vince” (Antonio Lorenzini, p. 14) e l’immagine senza titolo di Julie Fowells (p. 23). Ambiguità e liberazione sono temi connessi con l’esperienza dionisiaca, cui Pasolini fu molto sensibile: questa direzione è esplorata da immagini come “C’è Dioniso in ognuno di noi” di Chiara Pulin (pp. 30-31) e “Gran Bolero” di Igor Dražić (p. 34), dove la vitalità dei danzatori nudi ricorda la celebre esperienza teatrale della pièce teatrale “Dionysus 69” di Richard Schechner. A una dimensione più onirica riportano “Narciso fuori di me” di Rose Battistella (pp. 26-27) e il magico viso di una bellissima giovane ritratto da Zurab Babaev (p. 38).

Sul versante del non conformismo politico merita una menzione la simbolica immagine di Babis Kavvadias (p. 32), che tramite la silhouette di una figura femminile rappresenta la forza della protesta popolare nelle manifestazioni avvenute ad Atene nel 2018.

Rose Battistella

Violence

Cristina Garlesteanu Untitled

Cristina Garlesteanu Untitled

Babis Kavvadias

Athens, 2018

La Tragedia Dell'arte

Piero Colle

Totem - Le Streghe

Piero Colle

Roberta Con Lupo - Decameron

Solitudine

Cinematografico

Chetan Dodwad

The Holy Horse

rEligion & saCr Ed

By EnriCo MEdda

The theme of this section of the book is inspired by the deep interest Pasolini always cultivated for the theme of the sacred. Although he professed himself to be an atheist, consistent with his adherence to Marxism, , he recognised in himself the root of a religious experience cultivated for millennia and deeply imbued with beauty, which could not be set aside.

Pasolini was fascinated by the figure of Christ and by the subversive meaning it can assume against a bourgeois society polluted by capitalism and consumerism. In the opening of the short movie “La ricotta» (1963) the director felt the need to make clear that «the story of the Passion is the greatest that I know, and the texts that tell it are the most sublime that have ever been written». Its subversive potential emerges clearly in the sad ending, where the death on the cross of the “starving poor man” Stracci is the only form in which Christ can manifest himself amidst the crude vulgarity and superficiality of the producer and the film crew. On the other side, the figure of Jesus in the “Vangelo secondo Matteo” (1964) is characterised by a great humanity and the ability to address the weakest and the outcasts , who hear from him words of equality, justice and moral coherence.

The disruptive potential of the messianic figure is also present in “Teorema”, where the arrival of a mysterious guest within a middle-class family structured around the values of productivity and interest completely destroys its structure, representing the definitive and dead-end crisis of the bourgeois way of life. Only the maidservant Emilia, who after the amorous encounter with the guest returns to her poor country house and becomes a saint, proves to be capable to give the encounter with the divine a humanly productive outlet.

Behind the unsettling guest’s arrival, another powerful ancient model can be discerned: the arrival of the god Dionysus and his procession of Bacchae at Thebes, which leads to the tragic death of King Pentheus in Euripides’ “Bacchae”. This leads us to consider a second productive form of Pasolini’s approach to the sacred, namely his interest in myth and in the religious experiences of the ancient Greeks. In the Sixties he devoted himself seriously to the study of these themes with the aid of the essays on myth by Mircea Eliade and those on ritual lament by Ernesto De Martino. He thus conceived the idea of Greece as an archaic, pre-rational civilisation, still fully pervaded by the irrational experiences of dreams and magic; a

Greece then not classically rational, but rather 'barbaric'. He saw in myth the roots of the millenary agricultural civilisation that had preceded industrial civilisation and was being lost in modern Italy and Europe.

The potential of filmmaking was a natural instrument for Pasolini’s search of a visual language suitable for representing the archaic dimension of sacredness. In the “Vangelo secondo Matteo” he sets the story of Christ in the landscapes of Southern Italy still untouched by the industrial transformation, relying on Tonino Delli Colli’s austere black and white and on figurative references to the pictorial tradition of the 14th and 15th centuries. In “Edipo re” and “Medea”, on the other hand, he plays with the colours of the sunny landscapes of Morocco and Cappadocia, and with alienating costumes and gestures such as those of the Pythia and the Sphinx. The representation of the brutal human sacrifice that opens “Medea” is brought back to its more ancient nature of an agrarian rite, seen in a context that the arrival of the coloniser Jason irreparably destroys. Pasolini constantly pays attention to the expressiveness of faces: the beautiful Margherita Caruso in the role of the young Mary, the enigmatic gaze of Maria Callas, but also the faces of the inhabitants of Tanzania and Uganda who could impersonate Orestes and Electra in “Appunti per una Orestiade Africana”, an attempt to find in those Third World countries the fusion between the ancient irrational beliefs and the rationality of the new world. It is therefore clear how wide is the range of challenges that the confrontation with Pasolini’s works proposes to photographers who have tried their hand at this theme. Here we can find beautiful chromatic researches trying to render the ritual’s atmosphere of excitement: the yellow of the “Holy Horse” by Dodwad Chetan at p. 42; the yellow and lilac veils of two women (“Meditation in Bodh Gaya” by Viet Van Tran, pp. 50-51), the colourful uniforms of the penitents in Cristina Embil’s “Spanish Easter” (pp. 122-123). Many images search for sacredness in the magic of a glance, be it real, as in the delicate portrait “Estalkia” by Nurlan Tahirli (p. 72),or disguised in the form of a demonic mask (“Mythical” by Sarathi Thamodaran, p. 56). In the steps of the earlier movies by Pasolini, monochrome takes the lion’s share in images dealing with the Passion of Christ and other ritual moments, like the delicate procession of children dressed in white (“Mille gigli”, by Margrieta Jeltema, p. 73). I cannot say with certainty whether the Pasolini’s figurative echo in “Watpornima Worship” by Dodwan Chetan (p. 52) is intentional or not: nonetheless, the picture reminds me of the scene of the Pythia in “Edipo re”, placed under a large tree.

However, the reader will find many other happy developments of Pasolini’s religious suggestions in the following pages.

Il tema di questa sezione del libro è ispirato al profondo interesse che Pasolini manifestò sempre per il tema del sacro. Benché, coerentemente con la sua adesione al marxismo, si professasse ateo, egli riconosceva in sé la radice di un’esperienza religiosa coltivata per millenni e profondamente permeata di bellezza, che non poteva essere messa da parte.

Pasolini era affascinato dalla figura di Cristo e dal messaggio sovversivo che essa assume nei confronti di una società borghese inquinata dal capitalismo e dal consumismo. In apertura del film “La ricotta” (1963), il regista sentì la necessità di affermare che «la storia della Passione è la più grande che io conosca, e che i testi che la raccontano sono i più sublimi che siano mai stati scritti». Il suo potenziale sovversivo emerge chiaramente nel triste finale, dove la morte in croce del ‘morto di fame’ Stracci è la sola forma in cui Cristo può manifestarsi in mezzo alla rozza volgarità e alla superficialità del produttore e della troupe che gira il film. Nel “Vangelo secondo Matteo”, invece, la figura di Gesù si caratterizza per la grande

Julie Fowells Untitled